Galileo

Cendant Corp., which franchises everything from Avis rental cars to Ramada and Days Inn hotels, confirmed it's in talks to acquire Galileo International Inc., which provides computer reservations systems for travel agencies. New York-based Cendant would pay about $3 billion for Galileo, of Rosemont, Ill., according to published reports. Cendant declined to disclose terms. Both companies warned that the deal could fall apart. Accenture slicing 1,400 jobs Consulting firm Accenture Ltd. said Thursday it will cut 1,400 jobs at its offices around the world because of the growing economic slowdown.

Re Florida's science standards: Nearly 400 years ago, Galileo was ordered not to teach as fact that the Earth rotated on its own axis and revolved around the sun. Now, Florida's science teachers cannot teach evolution as fact. We are almost certain to fail the national assessment of our science curricula with this. A recent article in your Business section describes how businesses are moving out of Florida because our school system is not up to par. Barry Perlman, Davie

After repeated failures to jolt free the Galileo spacecraft`s main antenna, engineers have begun preparations to salvage the craft`s mission to Jupiter by making the most of a weaker, slower-transmitting small antenna. A disappointed Dr. William J. O`Neil, project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said on Wednesday: "There is really nothing left for us to try." Using the small antenna, Galileo will return 2,000 to 4,000 pictures instead of the originally planned 50,000.

Re William Butte's OpEd column of Dec. 12: Great, lucid article. I worked with 20 abusing priests in San Francisco and almost all had a heterosexual persona. One would think that the Vatican would have learned its lesson with "junk science" with the Galileo fiasco.

NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter threatened at times in its long journey to become a humiliating failure, slowly playing out its sad fate beyond help almost half a billion miles from the sun. Instead, the spacecraft overcame a crippled main antenna and other problems, and its human handlers have successfully completed their two-year Prime Mission, producing dramatic evidence that the Jovian ice-moon Europa once harbored a liquid ocean capable of, if...

Scientists on Tuesday got their closest look ever at Jupiter's frozen moon Europa, a crackled and blistered body that could have an ocean harboring life. The look was courtesy of the Galileo spacecraft, which swooped 124 miles above Europa's surface and recently detected signs of magnesium salts that point to a possible briny ocean beneath an icy crust. "Europa really is the gem of the solar system," said Ronald Greeley, an Arizona State University geologist. Officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also showed images from the last Europa pass on Nov. 6, with new signs that slushy material is pushing upward, rupturing the surface and freezing.

`Galileo' gets second chance at Europa Galileo was launched Oct. 18, 1989 to study Jupiter. It took six years to get there. The trip was suppoed to end in December, but got a two-year extension to take a closer look for life on Europa. The extension includes eight Europa encounters to gather more information. Scientists from six nations are participating. Jupiter's inner moons Of the 16 moons orbiting Jupiter, eight are the inner moons, including the four largest, called the Galilean Satellites: Earth's moon for size comparison Europa's surface is -230 degrees Fahrenheit, but scientists think waters below the surface may be warmer.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- A year before scientists thought it would be possible, NASA officials expect to obtain within a week the first-ever photograph of an asteroid, the Peninsula Times Tribune has learned. After days of calculating, scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena hope to show the world the asteroid`s full image by next Friday. Because of technical flaws in the spacecraft Galileo, scientists did not expect to see the surface of Gaspra -- a lumpy asteroid floating between Mars and Jupiter -- until November 1992.

Re William Butte's OpEd column of Dec. 12: Great, lucid article. I worked with 20 abusing priests in San Francisco and almost all had a heterosexual persona. One would think that the Vatican would have learned its lesson with "junk science" with the Galileo fiasco.

According to schoolbook and common-culture legend, the Vatican, in 1633, forced Galileo to renounce the theories which put the sun instead of the Earth at the center of the universe, presumably because demoting mankind from the central position was contrary to scripture as the Church interpreted it. In his moment of humiliation, Galileo is said to have turned aside and muttered, "eppur se muove," which can be translated as "nevertheless," (or "and yet"...

When most people think of Norman, they think of the University of Oklahoma Sooners. Galileo, in other words, does not spring immediately to mind. Nor does Copernicus. Nor Aristotle, nor Leonardo da Vinci. Yet these legendary players in the fields of arts and sciences keep each other quiet company among the university's remarkable History of Science Collections, which I got to peruse briefly during a visit for the dedication of OU's new College of Journalism. A casual visitor isn't likely to stumble across the collections' 90,000 volumes, which are located on the fifth floor of the Bizzell Memorial Library.

The producer's credit says Nova, but the $1.2 million production of Galileo's Battle for the Heavens seems to say Masterpiece Theatre. With its dramatic conflict and sumptuous scenes of Renaissance Italy, the two-hour special is so theatrical it wouldn't be surprising to see stalwarts of the Royal Shakespeare Company popping up in bit parts. That far the show doesn't go, but it does star Simon Callow (Shakespeare in Love, Four Weddings and a Funeral) as Galileo Galilei, the 17th century philosopher-scientist revered as the father of modern experimental science.

Twenty times larger than the sun, tens of thousands of times larger than Earth, the largest object in the solar system is a violent, radiation-filled magnetic bubble that surrounds Jupiter, according to new data resulting from the timely rendezvous of two spacecraft around the giant planet. "This inner region is probably the most intense and hazardous environment in the solar system except for the surface of the sun. It's the extreme of the extreme," said Scott Bolton, a space physicist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

Whenever I come across a person who wraps himself with the flag, emits patriotic fervor, and ends his diatribe with "why don't you move," I am reminded of the "Galileo Syndrome," which recalls a time when religious wisdom instilled the principle that the Earth was flat. That malady currently manifests itself when an otherwise rational person cannot accept that others -- not necessarily only liberals, also with a flag, equally as patriotic, and born in and true to the U.S. of A. -- have concepts which differ from, but are not meant to be harmful to others.

Cendant Corp., which franchises everything from Avis rental cars to Ramada and Days Inn hotels, confirmed it's in talks to acquire Galileo International Inc., which provides computer reservations systems for travel agencies. New York-based Cendant would pay about $3 billion for Galileo, of Rosemont, Ill., according to published reports. Cendant declined to disclose terms. Both companies warned that the deal could fall apart. Accenture slicing 1,400 jobs Consulting firm Accenture Ltd. said Thursday it will cut 1,400 jobs at its offices around the world because of the growing economic slowdown.

Carbon-copy sheep One of the largest scientific breakthroughs was announced in February, researchers in Scotland had successfully cloning a sheep. Since then the Scottish scientists have cloned sheep that can produce human blood coagulant for use in treating hemophilia. Comet Hale-Bopp Last month, Comet Hale-Bopp disappeared from the night skies, not to be seen here for another 3,000 years. While it was near our solar system, the comet put on a good show as one of the brightest to come around in a long time.

Jupiter's moon Io got famous in the 1970s when the passing spacecraft Voyager detected active volcanoes there. Now another craft, Galileo, has taken the closest look ever at Io and found that it has a giant core of iron that takes up half its diameter. The only other body in the solar system in which a metallic core has been directly detected is Earth. A team led by Galileo scientist John Anderson, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., reports on the findings in the May 3 issue of Science.

Startling new close-up photos of Europa, one of Jupiter's big, strange moons, show what appears to be an ice-covered ocean, a discovery that could greatly improve the odds of life existing elsewhere, scientists said at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The new images, taken by the spacecraft Galileo Dec. 19 and to be released by NASA today, indicate Europa has a thin, fragile layer of blue ice that covers a thick layer of what could be a liquid water, or semi-frozen slush.

NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter threatened at times in its long journey to become a humiliating failure, slowly playing out its sad fate beyond help almost half a billion miles from the sun. Instead, the spacecraft overcame a crippled main antenna and other problems, and its human handlers have successfully completed their two-year Prime Mission, producing dramatic evidence that the Jovian ice-moon Europa once harbored a liquid ocean capable of, if...

Scientists on Tuesday got their closest look ever at Jupiter's frozen moon Europa, a crackled and blistered body that could have an ocean harboring life. The look was courtesy of the Galileo spacecraft, which swooped 124 miles above Europa's surface and recently detected signs of magnesium salts that point to a possible briny ocean beneath an icy crust. "Europa really is the gem of the solar system," said Ronald Greeley, an Arizona State University geologist. Officials at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory also showed images from the last Europa pass on Nov. 6, with new signs that slushy material is pushing upward, rupturing the surface and freezing.